The fixed network equipment (FNE) of today's wireless telecommunications systems is expected to provide services on the order of 99.999% of the time. Thus, the high availability systems that make up the FNE must be designed to handle the inevitable component failures with minimal impact to user services. One problem that can occur in high availability systems is the failure of device cards during power-up and initialization. Particularly, problematic are failures that lock up a common communication bus that serves many or all of the device cards in a system chassis. These failures effectively disable the entire system and are not remedied by re-initializing the system. Thus, the system is down until the device card can be manually replaced or at least removed, likely impacting user services for a significant period of time. Therefore, a need exists for a high availability system and method of initializing that address failures that lock up common communication buses in these systems.